Thursday, 1 February 2018

Coward.

Last night I found myself standing on a stage in front of about 100 people completely butchering my lines. No one really noticed apart from the director and my cast members, and even then they weren't sure because, God knows how, I kept in character.

I only realised that I was getting things really wrong when I looked up at my poor cast-mate's embarrassed face as I repeated words twice and didn't make any sense. She has countless more lines to remember than I do and never butchers them, I had one monologue and was messing it up.

I knew immediately that I had let myself down through lack of focus. I had let myself go into autopilot and forgotten to be in the moment. I could have told you it was going to happen before I got on stage when I was silently panicking that the emotion I had brought to focus the night before wasn't there. And I could have done a lot more to stop my mind from wandering but I got so caught up in feeling scared and believing, before it had happened, that I was going to mess up my performance that I did.

I keep doing that a lot in various parts of my life recently. Believing that I can't do something and subsequently not being able to do it. Paradoxically I know that I can do whatever it is I'm trying to do, and that I have the potential to do it really well, but it's almost like I self-sabotage as if to prove myself right, or wrong, depending which way you look at it. Perhaps I do this as an excuse not to do things that scare me, or in an attempt to avoid failure. Perhaps I'm just being a coward. Perhaps I just need to stop pretending that I don't believe in myself.